Mass Effect 2 (ENGLISH)

Mass Effect 2 (Jack Wall, Cris Velasco, Sascha Dikiciyan and Christopher Lennertz). Rarely a story begins in a way as surprising as Mass Effect 2 does, and only a few piano notes accompanying to this crucial moment create an effect very surprising and dramatic that really affect on the one who is playing it.

The soundtrack album of ME2 opens with the most recognizable and present theme along the whole story, which is not other one that the theme of The Illusive Man, and it is that The Illusive Man turns into a main character of the story, with any more importance even than Saren Arterius had in the first part Mass Effect. Humans Are Dissapearing gives the beginning to the history with a dramatic theme, revealing the strange event of the progressive disappearance that the human dispersed colonies for the galaxy are suffering. In The Attack we return to listen to the theme of the captain Shepard's ship mixed with the collectors' sounds, during the sequence of the attack to the first Normandy. After the beginning of the story, The Lazarus Project is a nice theme that sails along the process of Shepard's reconstruction, whereas A Rude Awakening incorporates us into the action in a definitive form after Shepard's awakening to his new life. The soundtrack continues showing long themes dedicated to every member recruited by Shepard for his team, located in different situations and different worlds, which gives each one a different appearance, and splashed with other more short themes like Freedom's Progress, An Unknown Enemy and Horizon, whose common shade is its worrying essence, denoting the collector threat, almost terrifying. Probably the most noted themes are those located at the end of the album, as the worrying The Collector Base, the heroic The End Run and Suicide Mission, and the agreeable New Worlds, the theme used for the planetary exploration.

The album Atmospheric contains less melodic and more ambient themes than those of the main album, present along the story in the multiple worlds and scenes deployed in Mass Effect 2. But not for it it's a less advisable album, since, for the one who has enjoyed the game, Atmospheric will immerse the listener in the worlds visited during the adventure, for what it is a necessary complement to the listening of the main album. In the other hand, the album Combat adds more cues composed by Jack Wall for the action and confrontation sequences, and ends up by being the least attractive album of all those which shape the soundtrack of Mass Effect 2, though it contains important tracks in the story like The Long Walk or The Human Reaper.

For the downloadable contents, Kasumi: The Stolen Memory, Overlord and Lair of the Shadow Broker complete Mass Effect 2 musical panorama. It's not comprehensible that the music of The Arrival DLC is missed, in spite of being a chapter with certain relevancy inside the plot of ME2 and ME3, and it could be listened only through the composers' website. The music of Christopher Lennertz, Sascha Dikiciyan and Cris Velasco for these chapters is excellent, providing really good themes, which improve the Mass Effect 2 musical experience, with noted themes like Death From Above (Kasumi), Combat Troops (Overlord), Shadow Broker (while we face the Shadow Broker inside Hagalaz's intense storms) and The Beginning of the End (The Arrival) (while we flee hurriedly of the Bahak system in the batarian space before the destruction of the Alpha relay).

The albums of the Mass Effect 2 soundtrack have been only published in digital format.